I used to work for this guy before I came here,” Dinky said. “Mr. Sharpton, his name was. He used to tell me that never’s the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.
He is a mechanic of the brain. He has cut it to piecese and found no soul. Therefore there is none. Like the Russian astronauts who circled the earth and did not see God. It is the empiricism of the mechanic, and a mechanic is only a child with superior motor control.
The article in the News had called it a falling accident, and it was true that Branson Buddinger had taken a fall. What the News neglected to mention was that he fell from a stool in his closet and he had a noose around his neck at the time.
I was saying that I’d only ask three beers apiece for my co-workers, if that seems fair,” Andy said. “I think a man feels more like a man when he’s working out of doors in the springtime if he can have a bottle of suds. That’s only my opinion. It would go down smooth, and I’m sure you’d have their gratitude.
The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny’s, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lolled. Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws.
The adverb is not your friend.
His own mortality suddenly whispered through his bones like a cold draft under a door.
That’s really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures – it’s the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castles in the sand. Some things call to us, that’s all. It’s as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads.
In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making.
The doors slam shut behind them, much too loudly and hard enough to shiver in their frames. Executive assistants who drag down eighteen thousand a year to start with close doors a certain way – with respect for money and power – and this isn’t it. This is the way angry drunks and addicts on the jones close doors. Also crazy people, of course. Crazy people are ace doorslammers.
If you want to know what political extremism can lead to, look at the Zapruder film. Take particular note of frame 313, where Kennedy’s head explodes.
Am Ende aller Vernunft steht das Massengrab.
Yeah. Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.
We had a bad summer here, my friend. Local folks keep it as quiet as they can – even the newspaper doesn’t play it up – but there was some nasty work. Murders. Half a dozen at least. Kids. Found one down in the Barrens just recently. Patrick Hockstetter, his name was. All decayed.
Hi, Lloyd,” he said. “A little slow tonight, isn’t it?” Lloyd.
Because it may be fragile, but I think it’s also immortal.
There was a lesson here, he realized, not a shining thing but something that was old and rusty and misshapen. It.
Beings too hideous to comprehend, according to Mr. C., and Mr. C. was a gentleman who dealt death for a living.
And then a frightful red Eye opened in the dark: vulpine, eldritch. The Eye terrified him yet held him. The Eye beckoned him. To the west, where the shadows were even now gathering, in their twilight dance of death.
As I recall, I had my own invisible friend when I was Danny’s age, a talking rooster named Chug-Chug.